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Fiction's Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation
Combining creative and critical responses from some of today's most progressive and innovative novelists, critics, and theorists, Fiction's Present adventurously engages the aesthetic, political, philosophical, and cultural dimensions of contemporary fiction. By juxtaposing scholarly articles with essays by practicing novelists, the book takes up not only the current state of literature and its criticism but also connections between contemporary philosophy and contemporary fiction. In doing so, the contributors aim to provoke further discussion of the present inflection of fiction--a present that can be seen as Janus-faced, looking both forward to the novel's radically changed, political, economic, and technological circumstances, and back to its history of achievements and problems.
Editors R. M. Berry and Jeffrey R. Di Leo contend that examinations of fiction's present are most informative not when they defend philosophical distinctions or develop literary classifications, but when they grapple with elusive topics such as the meaning of a narrative present or the relation of fiction's medium to its representations of context. As the essays reveal, this process, when pursued diligently, breaks down traditional divisions of academic and intellectual labor, compelling the fiction writer to become more philosophical and the theorist to become more imaginative. The value of this book is not in the exhaustiveness of its treatment, but rather in the seriousness of the criticism it incites. The present materializes in quarrel, and it is toward such a beginning that the writings in Fiction's Present work.
Editors R. M. Berry and Jeffrey R. Di Leo contend that examinations of fiction's present are most informative not when they defend philosophical distinctions or develop literary classifications, but when they grapple with elusive topics such as the meaning of a narrative present or the relation of fiction's medium to its representations of context. As the essays reveal, this process, when pursued diligently, breaks down traditional divisions of academic and intellectual labor, compelling the fiction writer to become more philosophical and the theorist to become more imaginative. The value of this book is not in the exhaustiveness of its treatment, but rather in the seriousness of the criticism it incites. The present materializes in quarrel, and it is toward such a beginning that the writings in Fiction's Present work.
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310 pages, Paperback
First published November 23, 2007
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About the author
R.M. Berry
9 books4 followersRalph M. Berry, Professor, Ph.D., MFA Iowa (1985), specializes in twentieth century literature, critical theory, and creative writing (fiction). In 1985, he served as a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Tours in France. R. M. Berry is the author of the novels Frank (2005), "an unwriting of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," and Leonardo's Horse, a New York Times "notable book" of 1998. His first collection of short fictions, Plane Geometry and Other Affairs of the Heart, was chosen by Robert Coover as winner of the 1985 Fiction Collective prize, and his second, Dictionary of Modern Anguish (2000), was described by the Buffalo News as "a collection of widely disparate narratives inspired...by the spirit of Ludwig Wittgenstein." Berry's essays on experimental fiction and philosophy have appeared in Symploke, Narrative, Philosophy and Literature, Soundings, American Book Review, Context, and numerous critical anthologies. With Jeffrey Di Leo he has edited the essay collection, Fiction's Present: Situating Narrative Innovation, (SUNY Press: 2007). From 1999 through 2007 he was publisher of Fiction Collective Two. He is currently chair of the English Department of Florida
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January 1, 2018You'll want to read the Afterword first of course.
Highlights are the contro's by fictionists ; less so the critical pieces if only due to my orientation of interest. But, ::
Delany
McElroy
Evenson
(Lance) Olsen
Martone
Everett
Federmannamredef
Sukenick
Maso
And a nice piece by Klinkowitz on the history of FC/2 which should add some nice stuff to your tbr at a minimum.
Kind of works as a preliminary volume to Flore Chevaillier's stuff.
Highlights are the contro's by fictionists ; less so the critical pieces if only due to my orientation of interest. But, ::
Delany
McElroy
Evenson
(Lance) Olsen
Martone
Everett
Federmannamredef
Sukenick
Maso
And a nice piece by Klinkowitz on the history of FC/2 which should add some nice stuff to your tbr at a minimum.
Kind of works as a preliminary volume to Flore Chevaillier's stuff.
April 5, 2011
Uneven collection. Highlights are Evenson and Everett.
From Brian Evenson's Notes on Fiction and Philosophy:
"Probably our biggest difficulty with acknowledging fiction's present involves the insistence of the models of the past, which, like Melanie Klein's part objects, we have internalized and which seem to speak to us from within with a voice of authority. Thus, to move to an understanding of late 20th and early 21st century fiction, the first step is to move out of the 4th century B.C.: to let go of the Aristotelian notions that still dominate most thinking about fiction in writing workshops today. Indeed, one of the paradoxes of the institutionalization and burgeoning of writing programs here has been that most of these programs are much less interested in pointing to fiction's present—let alone fiction's future—than in preserving fiction as an eternal past tense. Discussions of setting, plot, character, theme, and so on, their parameters derived from Aristotle, seems hardly to have advanced seem hardly to have advanced beyond New Criticism’s neo-Aristotelianism; and when a workshop student says “I didn’t find the character believable,” usually the model for believability is firmly entrenched in nineteenth-century notions of consistency that have probably less to do with how real twenty-first century people act (not to mention nineteenth-century people) than with specific, and often dated, literary conventions."
From Brian Evenson's Notes on Fiction and Philosophy:
"Probably our biggest difficulty with acknowledging fiction's present involves the insistence of the models of the past, which, like Melanie Klein's part objects, we have internalized and which seem to speak to us from within with a voice of authority. Thus, to move to an understanding of late 20th and early 21st century fiction, the first step is to move out of the 4th century B.C.: to let go of the Aristotelian notions that still dominate most thinking about fiction in writing workshops today. Indeed, one of the paradoxes of the institutionalization and burgeoning of writing programs here has been that most of these programs are much less interested in pointing to fiction's present—let alone fiction's future—than in preserving fiction as an eternal past tense. Discussions of setting, plot, character, theme, and so on, their parameters derived from Aristotle, seems hardly to have advanced seem hardly to have advanced beyond New Criticism’s neo-Aristotelianism; and when a workshop student says “I didn’t find the character believable,” usually the model for believability is firmly entrenched in nineteenth-century notions of consistency that have probably less to do with how real twenty-first century people act (not to mention nineteenth-century people) than with specific, and often dated, literary conventions."
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews